ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the “true” version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren’t getting updates from any other lemmy, as the “true” version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
This seems like it’s worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don’t think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don’t think they fully understand what defederation does.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I’ve received many of those so I can tell you that it’s pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense “shit just got real” moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
This is the first time I’ve heard someone call the exodus from reddit “rexxit.” I haven’t been on lemmy too much yet so maybe it’s a common term I I’ve just missed but I love it.
I’m by no means the one who coined it. I just read it someplace else, but I find it fitting too!
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Thanks for this explanation, this makes a lot of sense and makes me less concerned about the whole thing.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
I’m not the most savvy person there but it simply means to me that the defederated server cannot post or interact with the matching server. Moderation still works on both ends, enacted by their respective teams. This is akin to a server-wide “mute” button directed to content from another server.
There are plenty of instances that let you sign up instantly. To achieve that goal, they’d need de-federate with all such instances. Which they can, but I still think that’s a bad idea.
I believed their intentions were good at first, until I’ve read/seen how they treat users who dissent at all, and even chastise and accuse users who ask for clarification of rules as outing themselves as a bigot. That includes admin responses to users there genuinely asking about rules with terribly vague wording…
That place is on a fast tract to becoming a shit reddit says clone; not a clone of reddit in general…
I’ve seen SRS, neogaf and resetera follow that sort of route so I get where you’re coming from.
I’ve yet to interact a lot with beehaw so I reserve judgment on that front though. As you said, I think their defederation comes from a good place, having seen the same happen to a lot of mastodon instances.
I do know I certainly won’t be interested if beehaw turns into the same kind of abuse-ridden, toxic hellhole as the above, that’s for sure.
Because they have community rules? It’s pretty normal for communities and online spaces to have rules and moderate those rules and if you misbehave aka ignore said rules, you get either your comment deleted or banned. Just like in real life, if you are at my house and you don’t follow my rules and just dig holes in my garden or destroy something because it’s fun, I will show you the door. Same goes for online places. The server/instance owner/host etc makes the rules
On the bright side, at least I have drama content to read. Maybe this thing can replace reddit… lol
I came up with a list of examples to explain this, but I can’t see to add them to the post. I’m having a really hard time posting today. So here they are in a comment. I think this helps show exactly what’s going on.
Examples
If this still doesn’t make sense, then try the following examples. I hope being able to see defederation in action makes this a little more clear.
Beehaw Communities
We’re going to use gaming@beehaw.org as an example of what happens to beehaw communities
Here are three links:
- https://beehaw.org/c/gaming/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.world/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on beehaw. All of these are sorted by new, because it makes it very obvious when defederation went into effect. You can see that there are several new posts.
The second link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.world. You can see that all the posts before defederation (5 hours ago at time of writing) are the same as the beehaw one. But now, none of new posts are visible. We no longer get updates from the “true” version on beehaw. There are some new posts there, but all are posted by lemmy.world users. And the posts from lemmy.world users are not visible on beehaw.
The final link is to the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.ml. This is identical to the beehaw.org community, as the “true” version is on beehaw.org, the one that gets updated on other communities is the “true” version.
Lemmy.world communities
We’ll use the lemmyworld base community as an example:
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https://beehaw.org/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first post is the version of this community as hosted on beehaw.org. You can see from 5 hours ago, there are no more posts. That’s because they no longer receive the “true” version of this community. Someone on there could still post, but then it would only be visible to other people on beehaw.org.
The second shows it as hosted on lemmy.world. We can see all the posts. The last link shows it as hosted on lemmy.ml, and we can see it’s the same as the lemmy.world version. The “true” version is on lemmy.world, so lemmy.ml keeps up with the updated version.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
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https://beehaw.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.
Comment example
I found this one really entertaining:
This is the same post hosted on three different instances. Since the community is on lemmy.ml, the “true” version of this post is the lemmy.ml one.
It was posted by a beehaw.org user AFTER defederation, but it’s still visible to lemmy.world users, since the community it was posted to is lemmy.ml, not beehaw.org. We can comment on it, and those comments are sent to the “true” version on lemmy.ml (and then shared to the wider fediverse). However, comments from lemmy.world are NOT sent to the version of this post on beehaw.org.
When I found this example, there were only two comments on this post, both from lemmy.world users. So the poster did not get an initial response because of defederation.
Looks pretty dumb to me, but hey if they want a walled community they have the right to have it.
It doesn’t align with me and it makes me super happy of being here instead of there.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and also your other example comment, super useful!
As for me, I’ll simply unjoin their communities and find the same somewhere else, I feel a bit sad tho for open users there that will have to create a new account somewhere else.
Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they’ll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It’s rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
I’ve got to say I’m really frustrated with this. Beehaw ignored or denied my registration so I joined here, spent time curating a feed and now I guess I lose out on a substantial amount of that?
Which server is going to cut off my stuff next?
Profoundly frustrating and discouraging. I don’t know what server to recommend to people so that they can get the most content.
It will be this type of action that will drive users away from the Fediverse and back to reddit or some reddit alternative.
I agree, this kind of thing is exactly what I think is going to stunt Lemmy growth. Federation is a double edged sword.
I think it will suck more for beehaw, and I think beehaw will start looking very toxic for everyone else in a future very close to us.
I’m in the same boat. I really liked BeeHaw, but I couldn’t get in. I joined .world instead, the largest, most stable alternative, and now I’m boned.
I think that as the fediverse grows, it might become common/necessary to have a few accounts in order to see everything you want to see. Honestly, if that’s the price I have to pay to avoid centralization and enshittification, I’m ok with that.
undefined> I think that as the fediverse grows, it might become common/necessary to have a few accounts in order to see everything you want to see.
Exactly. And that’s good, because that’s how the internet is supposed to function in the first place.
(Plus, it helps against the enshittification and all that)
This should be pinned IMO, it was confusing to see the announcement but still see the posts.
Hopefully we can re-create good Gaming and Technology communities here.
Huh, that didn’t take long. Lemmy doesn’t have legs if this is the start of things (community fragmentation).
Not even a week on here and there’s already fragmenting drama. Yikes.
People see more drama than it actually is. We all still come from Reddit mindset but fragmentation is a feature not a hindrance.
I am not here to show Reddit my middle-finger. I am hear because I like what fediverse stands for and if the price is smaller communities, so be it.
I mean, I came here to give Reddit the middle finger, but I also didn’t know it existed before. Now that I do and I’ve been learning about the fediverse, I really like the idea. I think this concept is a good idea, and I’m actually glad to have joined the day before this whole separation drama thing kicked off. I’ve learned a lot about how this works, and can see the real world impact of an instance defederating.
I’m hoping for more diverse communities myself. Still have English as a barrier but those multilingual folk should have more options.
We live on internet drama. It is how I can survive the day 😁
Someone needs to make a regularly updated map of which instances are federated with which other instances.
Edit: Ok, apparently there’s one here but there’s over 600 instances and trying to show the connections between all of them destroys your browser.
As a Reddit refugee, and thus part of the problem, this kind of thing is what makes me unsure if I want to use Lemmy. I don’t want to suddenly lose access to communities I’ve become accustomed to for reasons beyond my control.
Also, is there a way to see all the instances that have specifically defederated or blocked this one?
It is in your control, just not on a day to basis. You choose which instance your account is on and that is an important decision with consequences. People have signed up to lemmy.world because it’s easy but maybe their approach doesn’t match what you’re looking for.
It is hard at the moment because everything is in flux so the consequences of choices aren’t very clear. One thing to remember though - you don’t have to have just one account.
the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit’s success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.
99.9% of people don’t care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they’re just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn’t matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don’t, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it’s just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.
Yeah I’m starting to realize some things after really exploring Lemmy after a few days. My biggest concern is that the whole federated thing isn’t gonna work for me. I don’t want to hunt for small communities and then risk losing them in petty squabbles by those who control them. It’s like a whole bunch of little villages who claim to be united and connected, but in reality any village can cut off contact with any other for whatever reason their village leader(s) decide. You can leave the village if you don’t like it, sure, but do you really want to end up as an internet nomad? I sure don’t. Federation clearly does not inherently mean everyone is connected, despite what some proponents of the fediverse might say.
I don’t understand this post at all apparently. If I am now subscribed to beehaw, does that mean i’m exempt from being defederated? Or do I need to try signing up for lemmy.one?
It doesn’t make you exempt. Your home instance is lemmy.world so you’ll see a stale copy of all beehaw threads that stopped being updated at the time of the defederation. If you interact with these threads, users on beehaw won’t see your comments and upvotes. You’re basically shadowbanned because they defederated from your home instance.
Jesus Fucking Christ. I’m a very basic web user, I don’t have the technical understanding to navigate this.
Some other comment explained that if you have an account on instance amd this instance is defederated by other instance then when you interact with posts on instance defederating you, you will only see comments from other people from your instance. I’m not sure if you can see comments made by users from other instances.
Yes, you can go to here to see the instances that are currently linked and blocked in your community.
Edit: Nevermind, this only shows instances your community has blocked. Let me see if there’s a better way.
Let me see if there’s a better way.
I’m also searching and gathering, let’s share! Also tagging @Homo_Stupidus@lemmy.world
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances#all-lemmy-instances
3rd colum from the right (BI) shows the number of instances blocked from this instance. It does not tell you which instances are blocked specifically, but gives a rough idea with an overview.
Bottom left you can check ‘blocked’ and see a visual graph of red defederations. This view becomes increasingly unusable as lemmy grows, and already takes some time to load.